Time Management and the Feared "To Do List"

"The successful person takes advantage of time all the time; the unsuccessful person laments in the lack of it."'  Jeffrey Gitomer [1]

There are 1,440 minutes in every day.  Subtracting 480 minutes (eight hours) for a good night's sleep leaves 960 useable minutes in every day.  Every person, whether you are a millionaire or you are dead broke, has exactly the same amount of time to spend each day.  Let's think of these minutes as dollars.  If you had $960.00 to spend each day and at the end of each day any unspent money would be taken away, how would you use those dollars?  What would be the highest and best use you could make of your money?  How would you use it, spending every cent wisely, every day?

The first thing you would do is to create a daily budget.  You would determine exactly how much each item cost, totaling your purchases carefully to avoid an overage or shortfall.  This example is useful to understand time management.  The goal setting exercises we discussed in the last article explained how to break a goal down into daily doable tasks.  Time should be budgeted in the same way.  A "Time Budget" involves scheduling to achieve a balance between time available and work that needs to be done.  When reviewing you goal tasks, a time estimate should accompany each task.  This way you get an idea of what you can expect to accomplish in a given day.

Once you've set up a time budget, you can concentrate on the matter at hand.  The most important principle to remember is to do what's important first.  This is intuitive.  You already know what to do.  Learn to distinguish between what's fun to do and what activity will make you money.  Fun things, while not bad in themselves, are often "preventable distractions."

To keep yourself on task, make a list of items you want to accomplish each day.  The best time to do this is at night before you go to bed.  Consider what you want to accomplish, make a list (with the estimated time needed) and then organize by importance.  for example, if you are facing late fees on bills, be sure to write those checks first, so you get them ready before the postman arrives.  There are two benefits to making this list the night before: you get to prepare for tomorrow and you unload all the things on your mind so when you go to bed, you will be able to fall asleep and rest.

When we awake the next day, refreshed, we're ready to get started right away on our TO DO LIST.  Robert does some of his best thinking while asleep.  Often he wakes with a solution to a problem that may have seemed difficult the night before.

Remember, each of us, whether millionaire or pauper, has the same amount of time each day.  It's up to you to determine whether you're wasting it or spending it wisely.

1 Gitomer, Jeffrey.  "The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching", pg. 86, © 2007